i think i'd like to do a religion thread on here some time. a way to whet my writing, which i've put off for too long. i'd want it to be opening up some of the repetitions i see in the discourses of ostensibly left critics (like anarchists)
i wonder how the Brent Nongbri book "Before Religion" would be received
i'm just saying the refrain of "i'm against religion because i'm against all false realities" really falls flat when you examine "religion" as a category at all
@exiliaex what the fuck is a reality that's some christian shit
@exiliaex @ZiaNitori isn’t reality just the medium through which we can affect each other and be affected?
@ZiaNitori @exiliaex is mean i guess i don’t really know a strong argument against solipsism
@destroy @exiliaex people use solipsism to describe anything they find absurd and i've yet to see what's absurd about being critical of someone trying to make a general claim about something "we" both experience especially when we presumably can experience radically different realities. the way you frame it too as the medium through which beings can affect each other also just sounds way to similar to reality being defined via relations to other beings which just screams christian to me cause those mfers think you can come to know gods world through correspondence with others
@ZiaNitori @exiliaex okay but like… how is it wrong?
@destroy @exiliaex my experience does not require correspondence to validate. correspondence still requires interpretation, and a singular argument with an ego blinded or hive minded person on twitter will show you the issues with how people insulate their realities, it's impossible to really know that you're not just finding a way to look into a mirror when you look at another. correspondence is how you make a show of force by invoking imagined others that believe in your reality. it's a show of procedure, it's a formality of certification, it's when the rental place has you to look over a piece of equipment you're seeing for the first time and asks you if you see anything wrong with it before you sign. it's a thing to show to other people to convince them of something because people find other people convincing because people are reflexively conformist.
@exiliaex @ZiaNitori I mean have you never hallucinated or seen a magic trick? I know I’m wrong all the time and that the knowledge of others is useful to me.
@exiliaex @ZiaNitori I have no reason to believe that my interpretation of sense data is different than other people’s on this level. My everyday interactions with people and objects affirm to me this. Sure I guess I could be interpreting everything in a specific way that creates a reality that truly is separate but this is just Cartesian skepticism but the daemon is simply your own mind.
Ultimately your view falls apart under its own weight because there’s exactly as much evidence to believe in an unshared reality as a shared one. There’s no more reason to believe your view because this lack of knowledge about others also prevents me from knowing if they are experiencing the same reality as me.
@destroy @exiliaex i have many reasons to believe my interpretation of sense data is different than other peoples given that interpreting sense data is not as simple as the neurons associated with your eye producing a color. the totality of your experience is riddled with association and reference to a world that is entirely your own. it is with abstractions that you make about the world based on facts produced in academia that you reduce all of this to the same experience, when if i am to interpret the behavior of other creatures we're all living radically different realities. normative pressures in society push people to act like they all experience the world in the same way when it just covers up difference and then we assume all nonhuman animal life to be something radically different that we ignore. also you bring up "evidence" like that's a coherent concept in this kind of discussion, i think you should think more about epistemology
@destroy @exiliaex i really dont know how the voice of others makes your reality more real when you're the one interpreting their voices and making your reality of them. it's not a coherent position it's just reflexive deference